Talk:Braum/@comment-8506165-20140830004555/@comment-6281696-20140908082147
Not really, technicly damage wins by a landslide. However, there are several reasons why full-damage won't ever get a properly high win-rate. First, most of these are increadibly item dependent, and once behind have nothing to fall back on because if they lack the damage to kill something they are basicly useless. This means that if you ever fall behind you've basicly lost the match unless your opponent refuses to push and allows you to farm for some reason. Second, with the values currently present, full damage builds effectivly reduce the game to a game of chance. Whoever hits first wins. Which basicly pushes all winrates to ~50%, and champions with longer animations get screwed a bit more. To be honest, even a lot of more "defensive" champions are going that way due to the obsession with burst & "plays", at least versus the squishier targets. Third, and most importantly, most champions in this game can easily get sufficient damage. You don't need a glass cannon zed to blow up a squishy, a decent renekton with one or two damage items can get the job done too. There's no reason to pick more damage instead of utility or survivability if all that damage is just going to be overkill anyway. And lastly, most of these proper glass cannons are spend after killing one target. Everything's on CD now, but there's still 4 targets left. Unless you have brilliant coordination and have each of your team kill one of theirs you're most likely better of with something that can at least continue to fight after unleashing their initial combo (similarly, stuff like Zed can get their combo ruined by a wellplaced stun, leading to the same issue). Now the reason as to why full utility won't ever get popular is quite simple. Because of the obsession with damage utility barely matters. Stuff dies too quickly for utility to shine. Take for example Annie support, now utility wise she completly loses out to say Leona. But since Annie can just melt the ADC in the time it takes for leona's stun to come of CD leona's advantage in terms of utility ends up being kind of irrelevant (in a 2v2 lane situation at least). Furthermore, when focussing completly on utility it is increadibly common to have your damage become completly irrelevant (unless you have some ridiculously effecient attack like Mundo's 25% current health cleaver). The base values on champions that don't have these ridiculously effecient attacks are so low that you end up barely being a threat to squishies, and the sturdier opponents are threatened more by a good minion wave than by you in terms of damage. Supports are allowed to remain mostly utility focussed only because the ADC already brings a stupid amount of damage. If you have a leona and say a Lucian, if leona ever catches you lucian will most likely be able to kill you by the time her stun ends. Leona's actual utility again doesn't shine because the fight's over long before it becomes all that impressive. Same with the other 3 you mentioned. It's why the whole support meta came into existance, the ADC is simply already enough damage in most situations, there's no need for massive overkill so get something that is "relevant" without relying on damage to support. This is also the reason you don't see vel'koz support (though he should work reasonably actually), there's simply no need for massive amounts of damage he brings, the ADC should normally be enough, so take something else (plus all the issues he has with builds because of the lack of money and such) There's only a handfull of situations where utility shines in the way it should, and for the most part this requires ridiculous amounts of utility. E.g. a team where everyone has AoE CC that can completly stop you from ever reaching the enemy back line, or the occasional full healer teams you run into on ARAM. And even those only work if they are backed up by some significant damage somewhere.